Good presentations! I enjoyed the points made about the use of near earth asteroids and the Moon in helping us develop and test strategies for colonizing more distant places -- I feel this is often neglected with all the interest in Mars lately.

Yeah, I'd really like to see this happen, though I admit a certain level of doubt that we'll actually try this anytime soon as well. It's a very crazy idea, and it would require a lot of cooperative effort to achieve it. But it's also the only idea which we know can work to reach the stars so quickly, and there does not seem to be any obvious physical or technological barriers which would make it impossible.

I would have initially thought that the problems of collisions with interstellar dust and how to aim precisely enough to flyby the target planet would be too difficult, but apparently they checked and think those problems can be worked.

DoctorOfSpace, eh... that's a bit of a stretch, at least for a few years after this technology comes about because not everyone has an amazon account or a phone. Shops would still have the cashiers. Agreeably, after a few years, shops might start reducing their employee number.